Launch At Paradise
2022 · 15m · USA
Directed by Carrie Ann Quinn
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tense
A powerful organization offers agents 'eternal life' by extracting and reorganizing their brain matter into a super-intelligence designed to end war and conflict — but the recruits soon discover the price is the loss of their individuality.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Quinn takes the tired 'immortality bargain' premise and flips it into something genuinely unsettling—a story about the horror of being remade rather than destroyed, where your erasure is sold as salvation. Most scouts would've passed on the recursive identity angle; it's exactly why this lands.
The film's formal architecture—layering the Twilight Zone moral puzzle with a puzzle-box narrative of iterative death and rewriting—shows considerable craft discipline and positions itself thoughtfully within the sci-fi ethics tradition, though the execution risks diffusing its conceptual weight across competing formal ideas.
The decision to literalize identity loss through physical rewrites rather than philosophical hand-wringing is what makes this work on a 15-minute budget; that choice alone—making the protagonist's crisis visible and strange rather than introspective—transforms a thought experiment into something tactile and genuinely disorienting.
Reviews
Every Time He Dies, They Rewrite Him
An intriguing science-fiction film... the multi-layered storyline will keep viewers on the edge of their seats.